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Four out of five people accused of rape never have to pay for their crime. Looking at it the other way around, only one out of every five people accused of rape or attempted rape will be convicted of either of these crimes.
This is just one of the many important and sometimes surprising findings of our study Rape in Namibia, which we believe is the first comprehensive study of a particular crime in Namibia.
In order to ensure a complete and accurate picture, we examined an enormous amount of data - including 409 individual police dockets and entries in court registers for 547 rape cases. We talked to police, doctors, prosecutors, legal aid lawyers, magistrates and rape survivors. We also tested our preliminary findings at a consultative workshop attended by thirty-three people from six regions.
Almost 1200 rapes and attempted rapes were reported in Namibia in 2005, which amounts to approximately 60 reported rapes for every 100 000 people. In a recent United Nations survey of crime, Namibia's "rape rate" ranked third highest out of the 53 countries in the study. South Africa topped the list, followed by Canada and then Namibia, which was just ahead of the United States. This is not an honour that we can be proud of.
But ironically, it does not necessarily mean that Namibia has more rapes than other countries. The high rank could result in part from good crime recording practices or from the general empowerment of Namibian women. Even so, we must not kid ourselves - rape is clearly a huge problem in Namibia and one of our most serious human rights issues.
Who is raped? Who rapes?
Just over one third of all rape victims are under the age of 18. The ages in our sample ranged from one-year old babies to elders up to 83 years old. The vast majority of rape victims continue to be women and girls, but you may be surprised to hear that 1 out of every 14 victims is a man or a boy - with almost all of them being raped by other men.
Indeed, most rapes of every sort are committed by men - 99% of the people accused of rape in our sample were...